Fundamentally, baking has changed little since the Egyptians discovered that fermintation of the dough would make a lighter loaf of bread. The basic processes of grinding the grain, mixing the dough and allowing it to rise and then baking the loaf in an oven remain basically unchanged. The making of bakery goods has required the ingredients of flour, liquid, salt and yeast, the maintenance of an oven temperature during the rising process, skillful kneading and proper baking. Modern commercial bakers use the same ingredients and fundamentally the same methods as do domestic bakers, but because the doughs are very much larger in size, careful controls must be employed throughout the process to assure uniformity of the product. In the development of the commercial baking industry, highly mechanized factories have evolved to process bulk quantities of ingredients for producing many units of bakery goods.
In the commercial production of cakes and pastries, icings and frostings have customarily been applied to tops of the bakery goods to enhance their flavor and customer appeal. The frostings have been made of sugar and liquid heated to a desired temperature, combined with egg white and stirred to the desired consistency. Icings have been made of sugar mixtures which have not necessarily been cooked. In either case, a freshly baked, moist cake, for example, could not be immediately iced because of its fragility, but instead it would have to be dried for a period of time in order to firm up before it could be handled in the icing deposition process. Alternately, if the freshly baked, moist cake were iced within a short period after having been removed from its baking pan, both the cake and the icing had to be allowed to air dry for from 15 to 60 minutes in order to enable them to firm up sufficiently for subsequent handling in a wrapping machine. If the freshly iced cake were immediately wrapped, the residual moisture in the cake would migrate into the icing layer, desolving the sugar in the icing and making it stick to the inside of the wrapper. The prior art commercial baking practices for iced cakes and pastries have always included lengthy drying periods to allow the cake to firm up for subsequent handling, to allow the icing to dry to a non-sticky consistency, and to remove the moisture from the cake so as to avoid a subsequent dissolution of the icing layer within the wrapped package.